Born in the year of the “final solution to the Jewish
question” in Germany, reared in Texas where I entered segregated high school
in the year the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education, I was
destined to build a life with a quest for justice at its center. My parents
stood up for principles of racial equality, and my life as an activist was
launched.

In 1961 I graduated from Brandeis University with a BA in
mathematics. My one desire was to leave the U.S., to make my way to a culture
as different from the one I knew as I could find, for I knew that what I knew
was such a tiny portion of what the world had to offer. I made my way, through
marriage and intention, to India, where I lived in extended family for seven
years, publishing two books, Bullock
Carts and Motor Bikes: Ancient India on a New Roadin 1972, and On a Tree of Trouble: Tribes of India in Crisis in 1974.

In 1972, I returned to the US, with a small son, a militant
set of principles about child-rearing, few ideas about earning a living, and
good friends in the San Francisco Bay Area. With the latter, I began a lay
practice in an alternative approach to psychotherapy called Radical Therapy,
work grounded in a social theory of alienation and a practice focused on
community-building, including group therapy and conflict resolution. We taught
workshops in mediation and trained therapists and mediators in long-term
apprenticeships.

After some fourteen years, as my son considered where he
wanted to go to college, I began enviously to long for a contemplative space in
which to explore more deeply, and more theoretically, the ideas on which my
practice was based. I applied to the sociology department at Berkeley and was
accepted.

The faculty afforded me precisely the forum I wanted, to
talk, to read, to write about the questions that occupied me, both in my
therapist persona and as an activist. I saw academia as a way to bring together
my attachments in South Asia to my more recent wanderings in the intersection
of psyche and society. Under the tutelage of Bob Blauner, Sandy Freitag, and
others, I returned to the subcontinent to study Hindu-Muslim conflict. In 1992
UC Press published Some Trouble with
Cows: Making Sense of Social Conflict,
an analysis of a riot in a Bangladeshi village, based only on the oral accounts
of the villagers.

While continuing my therapy practice, I’ve gone on since
then talking with people about moments of intense social conflict they’ve
lived, and trying to draw from those oral histories sociological theory with a social
justice bent. Bitters in the Honey
and 41 Shots, and Counting, both
resulted from that process.

I’ve also engaged in the field of conflict resolution
nationally, joining with beloved colleagues to challenge dynamics of exclusion
in the newly-professionalizing field. Together, we founded the Practitioners
Research and Scholarship Institute, a dynamically diverse group promoting
writing and relationships among oft-marginalized people. In 2008, the project
published its first anthology, Re-Centering
Culture and Knowledge in Conflict Resolution Practice.

From time to time, I have also taught at University of California, Berkeley in the
Peace and Conflict Studies program and the Sociology Department.